A Season of Waiting

June 24, 2016

My husband told me recently that he read an article that said, as we get older our lives tend to fly by more quickly than when we were younger because we have less monumental events, like losing a first tooth, or learning to drive. We talk about it all the time, “we can’t believe it’s already summer, it seems like it was just Christmas”. Really, it seems like time just slips through our hands and is gone in an instant. This is a large reason why I am such a big advocate for living every single second of life to the fullest and making sure you never look back and think, “I wish I had done that” or “I wish I had said this.”

On the contrary, there are also seasons in our life when time moves slowly and there’s that one thing that we have been waiting for that seems like it might take forever to happen. This season is called waiting, and it is in that season that I have been for almost two years. For my husband and me, it has been waiting for a baby. Ever since I was a little girl, I believed that I was born to be a mother. In my heart of hearts, if nothing else happened in my life, being a mom was the one thing that I was promised to be great at. Like most women, I grew up dreaming and planning for the moment when I was old enough to have children of my own and start my own family. Wiley and I have been together for nearly twelve years now and in our late teenage years discussed that we wanted to have at least four children of our own and possibly adopt more.

We had been married for four years when we decided that we were ready to be parents. I was so excited, like jumping up and down excited, the day that we looked at each other and said “it’s time, we can do this!” I immediately threw away all of the birth control and thought, that today would be the day! Little did I know, there is a lot more that goes into conceiving a child than just the obvious. Conception can only occur a couple of days out of the month, I had no idea that was the case. So our journey that leads us to today began.

As you know, I subscribe to the thought that if I live the most natural way possible, I will be the happiest and healthiest version of myself at all times. So, we tried to get pregnant without any outside help for a year. There were days when I would just stand in the bathroom and pray that God would lead me to peace because I was at such emotional discomfort from not being able to do this on my own. After a year, we finally scheduled a doctor’s appointment to help figure out what might be the “problem.”

Here comes the great news: there is no problem! So far the doctors have not found anything that might be preventing us from conceiving. I have had one hormone level that was a little low so a few rounds of medication have helped that quickly. But, even if there isn’t any known problem, and so we are still called to wait. A great friend, who happens to be experiencing the same waiting season, sent me this book last week. It’s called In The Wait and although I am only about four days in to the six week devotional, I am so thankful for it!

Over the past 22 months, I have learned so much about myself, my marriage, and patience. I know that things don’t always happen according to the plans that we have made but instead are often times quite the opposite. I know that waiting is hard, especially when the world continues to move on but we might feel stuck. No matter what we are waiting for, there are others that are having success at that thing we want so badly; someone got the job promotion you’ve been waiting for for months, your best friend’s boyfriend proposed after only a couple of months and you and your boyfriend have been dating for years, or in my case, everyone around me seems to have a sweet little bundle of joy in their belly or have little ones running around their feet. And we want it oh, so badly!

My hope is that we can take this time to appreciate what is happening in our lives and use it for our own good and the good of others. I pray that my story will help encourage and strengthen others who are in a season of waiting and just don’t know where to go. I know that I am a much happier person when I live for today and not tomorrow so that is exactly what I will continue to do. I have learned that there is joy in every single thing we do, we just have to find it. Although, I don’t have a baby right now, there are so many things that I have been blessed with in the meantime. No matter the struggle, I am thankful for where I am and hopeful for where I am going.